I can’t do stealth games. I guess I just don’t have the patience for ‘em, you know, all that sitting in the shadows, waiting for the enemy to walk past before sneaking past and getting to your goal. Still, I do enjoy a bit of the ol’ Splinter Cell, which has plenty of scope for killing everyone on the map. So I was kinda looking forward to the demo of Splinter Cell: Conviction.

What’s going on with Sam Fisher this time then? Well, his daughter’s dead (though I’m pretty certain that happened in Double Agent, but whatever, I’ll bite) and he’s looking to find out what the hell happened to her, acting outside of the law and with bringing his own special brand of justice. The kind where everyone in his way gets a bullet in the brain.

Gameplay is now more focused on killing everyone than sneaking past everyone, which suits me perfect. You still have to be sneaky, else you’ll get ripped to shreds by machine guns, but there’s definitely more focus on violence than sneaking. Your pistol has infinite ammo, even on Realistic difficulty, so you’ll always be able to cap some fools. The new “Mark and Execute” mechanic works a treat, allowing you to kill up to three enemies in a flash. In order to unlock it though, you have to melee kill an enemy, which gives it a little more depth than simply being able to kill people super quick. Other functions include the “Last Known Position”, where enemies will swarm on a ghostly apparition of where you were last seen, allowing you to sneak behind and kill them before they know what’s going on.

There’s a few niggles though. The controls, at first, are confusing and slightly counter-intuitive, particularly if you’re use to standard shooter controls. Reloading by clicking the left stick is a major example of this, as the X button is taken by your gadgets, meaning you’re likely to throw grenades all over the shop before you finally snap a new clip into your gun. To enter cover you hold the left trigger, and to zoom you click the right stick, so half the time you’re trying to line up a headshot you’re really snapping into cover. When you get used to the controls, however, they actually work quite well. The other problem is the enemy AI, which is quite happy to just walk straight forwards into your crosshairs for hours on end. It would be a lot better if they actually properly searched for you, but oh well.

Graphically the game is actually very nice. Character models are well crafted and attractive, and the game environments look lovely. The abandoned warehouse in the demo looked perfectly gritty, and the toilets where you interrogate a man look just the right mix of grimy and worn down. That said, the blood that appears when you smash the guy’s head into a toilet seemed to appear from nowhere, which wasn’t exactly perfect. One of my favourite things was that the objectives are literally written on the walls, and some cut-scenes take place projected on the walls, which is wonderfully artistic and sure to please the art crowd.

The voice acting is probably, again, the worst aspect of the game so far. The voice of Sam Fisher is just a little too gruff, to the point where he just sounds bored. The other actors seem a bit hammy, but altogether it isn’t horrific. The rest of the sounds are fine, although the noise that springs up when you get a “Mark and Execute” is perhaps a little too loud. Still, not bad overall.

Splinter Cell: Conviction looks like it’s going to be a great title when it gets released, but it just needs a little bit more polish to make it truly fantastic. Still, I’ll probably end up buying it when it’s released April 13th.

Excited about breaking some necks? Not really interested? Tell us in the comments!